XT 5160

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Thursday 05 May 2005 11:45, woodelf wrote:
> Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> >Erm, you seem to have left out BASIC, one version of which didn't
> > require you to have disks to use (ROM BASIC); however, that was
> > probably more useful on the 5150 PC than the 5160 PC/XT since the
> > PC had a cassette interface you could use with it, which the XT
> > lacks.
>
> Well I don't consider BASIC a programing langauge ... I consider it a
> curse on mankind. 

I think most of the people that collect late 70s and 80s microcomputers 
here will disagree with you on that one (along with people that used 
timesharing basics on minicomputers of the 70s).  

Personally, I first learned to write programs in BASIC on Apple ][e's 
when I was in grade school.  Shortly after that came playing with 
gwbasic on the machine we had at home, and then using DEBUG to write 
assembly code, and then a combination of QuickBASIC and MASM to finally 
be able to write "real" programs (well, stuff that ended up as machine 
code in EXE files).

Man, I miss my excursions in DEBUG some times.  DEBUG taught me what 
happened when you lowered the memory refresh rate - when memory on PCs 
was still refreshed via a DMA channel - by too much. :)

> I had forgot about BASIC but I was thinking of  
> langauges that came on  a floppy.

BASIC did come on a floppy as well... GWBASIC in MS-DOS and 
BASIC.COM/BASICA.COM in IBM-DOS (which used ROM BASIC to provide most 
of the functionality).

Pat
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